Bob Weir

[This is the fourth post this week on Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.”  You can find the first one here, the second here, and the third here.]

I’ve found over the course of doing my weeks at the blog that my interaction with a song usually takes one of two paths.  Either I get a song in my head that captures my imagination, and I write my way through the experience; or, more speculatively, I pick out a song that seems like it has a lot of potential and work with it for a while trying to find the connection. It’s almost inside-out vs. outside-in.  At first, I thought the former path more reliable for finding something deep and meaningful, at least to me, but what I’ve found over the course of the weeks is that going from the outside in can do this, too.  

As it happens, I rarely exhaust the song by following down its various leads, but rather find new nuances in it and usually make some kind of discovery.  This has happened with “Frankie and Johnny,” “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (Not that I didn’t love this song before; I just thought I wouldn’t discover anything new in it, but did.) “Fair Flowers of the Valley,” and “Mack the Knife,” to name a few.  I haven’t worn the songs out for myself.  I hope I don’t wear them out for you.

This has happened with “El Paso” as well.  It’s been an “outside-in” week.  Peeking behind the curtain here a little bit at Murder Ballad Monday, this has also been an extraordinary week  at the blog in terms of readership and reader response. The deep resonances of “El Paso” and some of our other songs have come through rather strongly on the blog itself and on our Facebook page. As I wrote in my first post this week, I initially didn’t connect very strongly with “El Paso,” but through the stories and responses of friends, and becoming more deeply acquainted with some of the dimensions of the song that I hadn’t heard before, it’s grown on me.  So, I’ve been grateful for the experience, and appreciate your joining me as I’ve explored it.

The Covers

With today’s post, I plan to keep it pretty simple, and take a quick tour through a few covers of “El Paso.”  Although it seems (at least from YouTube anyway) that there are abundant amateur covers of the song, performances by professional musicians are relatively few.  I’m not sure why that is, except for the vocal challenge the song presents in the B verses.

First place goes to Grady Martin, not because I think this is a particularly successful arrangement, but solely because he deserves respect for providing the excellent guitar work on the original.  The soaring strings and easy listening style of the arrangement aren’t my cup of tea, but Martin’s instrumental work effectively evokes the original.



Next up, we have the Grateful Dead.  Pat briefly mentioned the Dead’s version of “El Paso” in his “Murder at the Dead Show” series earlier this year.  I’ll reprise some of his comments here.  The connection between “El Paso” and “Mexicali Blues” is a pretty clear one.  Here we have part of Bob Weir’s (and, with the latter song, John Perry Barlow‘s) contributions to a musical mythology of the American West; a complement to the work of Robert Hunter.  Despite some changes in the emotional and moral universes of the two songs, the family resemblance is there.  If you read the lyrics for the song here, though, you’ll see that whether the protagonist gets away with the killing in “Mexicali” changes around 1973, as the lyrics for the song evolve.  It’s hard to imagine that in “El Paso.”

Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow

Here’s one of their live performances of “El Paso.”



“El Paso” by the Grateful Dead (Spotify)

Pat connects “El Paso” to “Mexicali” in relation to his own intergenerational experience of these two songs, and gives us a little history of “Mexicali Blues.”

Bob Weir and John Barlow began a songwriting relationship in the early 1970’s after the short, tumultuous collaboration between Weir and Robert Hunter that produced ‘Jack Straw’ among other classics. ‘Mexicali Blues’ was Barlow and Weir’s first song together.  Barlow noted ‘I was just stricken when I heard what kind of setting he’d chosen for it.'”

“Mexicali Blues” by the Grateful Dead

One of the things I appreciate about the Dead’s version of “El Paso” is that they manage to make the rhythm of the song work effectively in a band arrangement.  This is no mean feat, given the pacing of the song.

Compare their live performance in the YouTube clip with that of Cuban-American singer Raul Malo.  Although I don’t think the band quite hits it on the rhythm side–it seems to say, “well, here’s an old chestnut”–Malo’s vocal performance here is outstanding, particularly on the B verses.

Finally, on a slightly different rhythmic front, we’ll throw in an alt.country or cowpunk version courtesy of the Old 97’s, who contributed this version to the soundtrack for the American television cartoon “King of the Hill.”

The video is limited here, but it’s the only performance I could find on YouTube:



“El Paso” by the Old 97’s (Spotify)

That’s all for now, friends–well, mostly all.  I hope you’ve found something of interest and perhaps, like me, discovered some depths to the song that you didn’t see before.  As we’ve done a few times along the way, I’ve gathered the week’s songs into a Spotify playlist, if you’d like to do a little one-stop shopping for the material we’ve collected this week.

Coda

With the respect that I’ve developed for the song, I was somewhat hesitant to include this last piece of comedic tribute to “El Paso.”  But I couldn’t resist in the end.  Just because we occasionally take things seriously doesn’t necessarily, or even often, entail taking them too seriously.  I give you, in that spirit, Steve Martin’s version of “El Paso,” which, as usual, makes Martin himself the joke.